In many, if not all, employment discrimination lawsuits both the employer-defendant and the plaintiffs realize that there is a statistical disparity between the protected and non-protected employee groups at issue in the case. It is the meaning of the statistical disparity that is most frequently the area of contention and subject to differing interpretation by the employer and plaintiffs in the discrimination lawsuit. Since the 1970s employment attorneys and the courts have relied heavily on the mathematical and probability concept of statistical significance in assessing the underlying importance of an observed statistical disparity in employment conditions between different groups of employees.
